Ten stands, launches and trends worth prioritising at IBC2026 in Amsterdam, spanning cinema cameras, AI editing tools, lighting, displays and storage.
It’s IBC time again! Which means Amsterdam hotels have once again become almost comically expensive, Schiphol will no doubt find some way of testing our patience (about to head there now dear reader, wish me luck!), and tens of thousands of us are about to spend four days walking around the RAI convincing ourselves that 25,000 steps a day is somehow normal.
The press releases have been arriving thick and fast, but hey, that is really the point of IBC. You can read about this stuff all year, but nothing beats actually getting your hands on it, seeing it working properly and speaking to the people who designed it. There is a LOT going on this year too, from a new generation of cameras and genuinely interesting AI tools, through to storage, monitoring and infrastructure that is changing much faster than I think a lot of people realize.
As ever, this is not intended to be a definitive list of everything at the show. It’s the stuff I think is worth making time for, and in most cases the stuff I’ll be heading to see myself.
And yes, one last time: get a floor plan. The RAI remains a labyrinth, even after 15 years for me.
Here are my top 10 things to check out at IBC2026.
The headline is the new Generative Media Tool, which lets you generate video and sound directly inside the Premiere timeline. Select the area you need to fill, tell Premiere what you want, and it can use frames around the gap as context. That might sound like a small workflow detail, but it is actually important. Generative tools are a lot less useful if the process involves leaving the edit, opening another application, generating something, downloading it, importing it and then discovering it doesn’t quite fit.
There are new audio tools too, including Separate Crosstalk for splitting overlapping speakers and Dynamic Auto Ducking, but the thing I am most interested in remains Color Mode. Adobe has been steadily building this out since showing it earlier this year, and the latest beta adds Auto Color, Vignette and Midtones modules as it continues trying to make proper color work more accessible to editors.
Read: Adobe Premiere gets Generative Media Tool and new Color Mode features
The cool thing about Adobe at IBC is that you can usually get proper time with the product teams. This is one of those occasions where sitting next to somebody who actually helped design the software and saying “why does it do that?” is considerably more useful than watching another YouTube demo. Make the most of it and say hi.
The big immediate story this week is DaVinci Resolve 21.1, which landed just ahead of the show and adds a fairly ridiculous number of improvements. There are upgrades to multicam, the trim editor, the Photo page and media management, more than 25 new Krokodove shape and 3D tools in Fusion, plus new MultiMaster trims, AI assistant integration and 20 additional scripting APIs in Studio.
There are also some interesting little details that tell you where the market is heading. Resolve 21.1 adds support for DJI D-Gamut2/D-Log2, GoPro Log and Leica L-Log, which is another sign that the line between traditional cinema cameras and newer compact/computational cameras is becoming increasingly blurry.
Read: DaVinci Resolve 21.1 adds a wide range of new features
Of course, Blackmagic is much more than Resolve and there will be cameras, ATEMs, DeckLinks, HyperDecks and enough other hardware to lose a very decent chunk of your day looking at. That is usually exactly what happens to me. Give yourself an hour.
There is a slight complication: Sony’s own European stores are now listing October 16 for shipping after the camera slipped from its earlier schedule. Sony originally said the delay was due to production issues, but judging by the huge amount of traffic and interest we are seeing around the FX5 on RedShark, demand for this camera is clearly enormous. IBC may actually be one of your best opportunities to use one properly before customer cameras start arriving.
Sony itself is making the FX5 one of the centerpieces of its IBC booth, alongside the new DP5 and DP7 controllers and the development version of the RIALTO 65 image sensor block for VENICE 2. That takes Sony into 65mm capture territory, which is obviously at the slightly different end of the budget spectrum to the FX5, but very much worth seeing if you get the chance.
Read: Sony FX5 shipping is now expected in October
Canon (11.C41) is interesting too. The Cinema EOS line has become extremely broad, while all the chatter at the moment is around the EOS R8 Mark II, which is reportedly set for announcement on September 15, immediately after IBC. If the current information is correct, IBIS will make its first appearance at this level of Canon’s full-frame range.
Read: What we know about the Canon EOS R8 Mark II
Then there is Nikon (11.C25) and RED (11.C35). The Nikon ZR remains one of the more interesting consequences of Nikon’s acquisition of RED, combining a small full-frame body with RED-derived R3D NE RAW, 6K/60 internal recording and 32-bit float audio. It is currently £1,999 body-only in the UK, which shows just how aggressively this end of the market is moving.
ARRI (10.A24) remains ARRI, of course. It still sets the reference point at the top end, but the really interesting thing now is just how much technology from what used to be very rarefied territory is filtering down into much smaller and cheaper cameras.
And that brings us neatly to what I think is one of the biggest camera stories at IBC this year.
A few years ago I probably wouldn’t have put these companies this high in a professional broadcast and filmmaking list. That feels completely outdated now. They are coming from action cameras, drones, 360 capture, stabilization and computational imaging, and they are increasingly producing cameras that make an awful lot of sense for professional work.
DJI’s new Osmo 360 II is a good example. It has the industry’s first 1-inch square HDR sensor design, records 8K, supports 10-bit color and D-Log M across its video formats, and DJI’s Reframe software plugs directly into Resolve. It also has replaceable lenses, which on a 360 camera designed to be put in ridiculous places is something I am frankly amazed took this long.
Read: DJI Osmo 360 II global launch, specs and pricing
Insta360 is pushing in a different direction again. The Luna Pro takes the company further into the conventional camera space, rather than simply making ever-better 360 cameras. It pairs a 1-inch imaging system with the company’s gimbal and computational expertise, and the interesting thing here is really the direction of travel. Insta360 is no longer just asking how to make 360 capture better, it is asking what a small professional camera should actually look like if you started designing it today.
Read: Insta360 Luna Pro global launch, specs and pricing
Then there is GoPro, which has suddenly become very interesting again. The MISSION 1 Pro ILS has a 50MP 1-inch sensor, GoPro’s GP3 processor and, remarkably, a Micro Four Thirds interchangeable lens mount. It records up to 8K60 and 4K240, offers Open Gate modes, GP-Log2, timecode sync and 32-bit float audio. There are no electronic contacts on the MFT mount, so lenses are manual focus and aperture only, but that is still a very big shift from the traditional GoPro model.
GoPro has also released Mission Monitor, a free iPhone and iPad app with focus peaking, zebras, LUT preview and remote control. Again, we are well beyond the “strap it to your helmet” conversation here.
Read: GoPro MISSION 1 Pro ILS confirmed specs, price and release
There is another major piece of context around GoPro too. Its proposed $285 million combination with Starman Optical is much closer to a takeover than a conventional merger, with existing GoPro shareholders left holding only around 10% of the combined company. What makes the deal really interesting is Starman’s focus on optical transceivers for the AI data-center market. That business is still early-stage, so I wouldn’t pretend GoPro has suddenly become NVIDIA, but it does potentially give the company exposure to one of the fastest-growing areas in technology at exactly the time it is trying to reinvent its camera business.
Read: Why the GoPro/Starman Optical deal looks more like a takeover
IMO this is one of the most interesting stories at the show. Consumer camera companies are moving upmarket at exactly the same time that cinema technology is becoming smaller, cheaper and more computational. That can only be good news for filmmakers.
Aputure (11.B22) has done a huge amount over the last few years to normalise the idea that serious productions can use high-output LED fixtures as the first choice rather than the compromise. Godox KNOWLED (12.H38) is pushing very hard in the same direction, particularly at the bigger end of the market.
The Godox MG4K is a 2.3kW bi-color LED fixture designed to give the sort of output you would historically associate with a 4K HMI, but in a much more manageable package. Then there is the full-color MG4KR, which takes the same basic idea and adds a huge color range and G-Mount accessory ecosystem.
That is really where lighting is now. A few years ago the question was whether LED could replace traditional high-output sources. Increasingly the question is why you would want the heat, power draw and inconvenience of the older fixtures if an LED alternative can do the job.
Aputure provides useful context here because it is attacking exactly the same professional market with its STORM and NOVA families. The company has spent years building a complete ecosystem around fixtures, modifiers and Sidus control rather than simply making brighter individual lamps. The result is that both Aputure and Godox are now competing in spaces that not very long ago were dominated by a handful of much more expensive brands.
This is not just a trade-show thing either. Go to a proper studio, Pinewood, a Hollywood stage or a decent location shoot and look at what gaffers are actually choosing. The mix of brands has changed dramatically.
My advice at IBC is simple: go and look at both. Lighting is one of the few areas where standing in front of the actual product tells you infinitely more than reading the spec sheet. Output matters, but so does skin tone, beam quality, color behavior, rigging, noise and whether the fixture looks like something somebody will still want to use after twelve hours on set.
The choice for creative professionals has exploded, particularly around QD-OLED, and ASUS ProArt (11.B36) is a very good example of how quickly things have moved. Its PA27USD and PA32USD are proper professional 4K QD-OLED monitors, with 99% DCI-P3, Delta E under 1, 1000-nit peak output, built-in motorized calibration and 12G-SDI. The PA27USD has one SDI input and the PA32USD has two, so these are clearly being aimed at much more than somebody who simply wants a nice desktop monitor.
Then there is EIZO (7.D33), which has just launched its first OLED ColorEdge. The CG3200X is a 31.5-inch 4K QD-OLED specifically designed for professional HDR post-production, with 1000-nit peak brightness, 99% DCI-P3 and EIZO’s usual built-in calibration sensor. More interestingly, EIZO has developed new luminance and contrast controls to deal with the realities of using OLED for critical HDR work.
The other genuinely interesting monitoring story this year is Atomos (7.B19) acquiring Flanders Scientific (7.A21). On the face of it, these are two very different companies, but strategically it makes a lot of sense. Atomos starts at the camera with Ninja and Shinobi, moves through on-set monitoring with Sumo and Shogun, while FSI lives at the other end of the process with trusted reference displays for grading and mastering. FSI remains a separate brand, but Atomos can now legitimately talk about monitoring from camera through to final delivery.
Dell Technologies (7.B47) is worth looking at too. Its latest UltraSharp 32 uses 4K QD-OLED and is explicitly aimed at creative professionals, while the company is also pushing much harder into large-format high-resolution productivity displays.
The point here isn’t that there is one obvious winner. It is almost the opposite. Whether you want an excellent creator monitor, something with SDI, an on-camera display or a proper reference monitor, there are now more genuinely credible choices than I can remember.
Spend some time looking at them with your own eyes. This is not a category I would buy purely from a YouTube review.
7. Infrastructure: Matrox and Grass Valley
Broadcast infrastructure is becoming increasingly software-defined, but the really interesting vendors are not pretending that every SDI cable and hardware control panel on Earth is going to disappear on Tuesday morning.
Matrox Video (7.B15) is right in the middle of that transition with ORIGIN, its software-defined media platform. The broad idea is to decouple media processing from permanently fixed hardware and run functions dynamically on standard compute, on-prem or in the cloud. That aligns with the wider Dynamic Media Facility work happening across the industry and the move towards infrastructure that can be provisioned when it is actually needed rather than being permanently dedicated to one task.
Grass Valley (9.A01) is approaching the same problem from the perspective of a company with a huge installed base of traditional broadcast hardware. Its IBC2026 demo combines K-Frame, Maverik X, LiveTouch X and AMPP into what it calls a Unified Media Operation, showing how hardware control surfaces, software applications and third-party systems can exist in the same workflow. Grass Valley is also demonstrating Dynamic Media Facility principles across a complete camera-to-consumer chain.
That is probably the realistic future for most broadcasters. Nobody is throwing millions of pounds of perfectly good equipment into a skip because somebody put the word cloud on a slide. The interesting systems are the ones that let you use the infrastructure you already own while gradually moving towards something more flexible.
If you run facilities or live production, spend some time here. This is one of those bits of IBC that looks slightly boring until you realize it may dictate how the industry builds itself for the next decade.
The big one this year is the FS8, a new 1RU hybrid SDI/IP media processor. It can handle up to eight channels of HD or four channels of UltraHD and combines frame synchronization, up/down/cross conversion, frame-rate conversion, HDR/WCG processing, LUT-based color management, audio processing and SDI/IP gateway functionality in the same unit.
The useful bit is the connectivity: 12G-SDI, ST 2110, Dante and MADI. In other words, the FS8 doesn’t ask whether your facility is SDI or IP, it assumes you are probably dealing with both, which is a much more realistic way of looking at the world in 2026.
There is also a new node-based browser interface, which should make configuring complex workflows considerably less painful than the old “which menu is that setting buried in?” experience.
AJA never really chases hype, it just keeps making gear that ends up indispensable.
Storage used to be fairly simple. You bought something fast enough, made sure there was enough of it and, ideally, backed it up somewhere sensible.
That is not really the conversation anymore.
The biggest storage story of IBC week landed just before the doors opened, with OWC (7.A60) acquiring OpenDrives, which will be joining OWC on the same stand. OWC already owns Jellyfish, so adding OpenDrives and its Atlas software-defined storage platform, Edge technology and cloud-focused capabilities gives the company a much broader proposition stretching from storage sitting beside an editor all the way through to large-scale shared, edge and hybrid-cloud environments.
There is another very interesting piece of the OWC story too. Late last year it made a strategic investment in Strada, the peer-to-peer media collaboration company founded by Michael and Peter Cioni. Strada is trying to solve a slightly different part of the same problem by allowing large media files to move directly between collaborators without all of the traditional cloud upload/download overhead. OWC and Strada have already started working together commercially, and I think the interesting bit is what happens if that relationship gets deeper at the hardware level.
Read: Strada secures strategic investment from OWC
Put Jellyfish, OpenDrives and Strada together and you start to see where OWC thinks this is heading. It isn’t simply about making fast storage boxes anymore, it is about how media is stored, accessed and moved throughout a production.
Suite (1.D07) attacks the same problem from another direction. Rather than worrying too much about where the media physically lives, its S3 Native File Streaming is designed to let editors work directly from object storage without first having to copy or download the entire dataset. That becomes particularly interesting when we are talking about hundreds of terabytes or petabytes of material rather than a few camera cards.
Then there is iodyne (7.A36), which takes us almost in the opposite direction. Its Pro Data system now goes all the way up to 192TB in the same portable enclosure, offers up to 5.2GB/s read performance and can connect directly to four computers. It is basically what happens when somebody looks at a pile of external SSDs and decides there has to be a better way.
Symply (7.C21) then extends the conversation into shared storage, orchestration and archive. That matters because however clever the cloud becomes, people are still producing huge amounts of data that needs to be stored safely for years.
Different products, completely different approaches, but they are all solving the same problem: creative people really hate waiting for media.
It is going to be absolutely everywhere at IBC this year, but I am increasingly less interested in products that tell me they are “AI powered” and much more interested in the ones that can show me what they actually save me/us from doing.
Eddie AI (7.A38) is a good example. It has been developing at an almost ridiculous pace, but some of the most useful recent additions are not the flashy bits. Client review now works through a shareable link without reviewers needing an Eddie account, comments can export as frame-accurate markers into DaVinci Resolve, and Eddie can potentially action those notes itself. There is an AI B-roll planning board, beat snapping and a PAYG credits model too.
Read: Eddie AI v4 adds Avid support, C2PA signing, and generative b-roll
This is the kind of AI I like because it sits inside a workflow people already understand. It is not necessarily trying to replace the editor, it is trying to remove annoying bits of the process.
QScan (7.P44/46) is interesting for a similar reason, even though it is solving a completely different problem. QC is not glamorous, but there are few worse conversations than having a broadcaster or streamer reject the master you thought was finished.
QScan AQC handles a huge range of automated technical checks across video, audio, IMF, MXF, HDR and other delivery parameters, and recent updates add GPU processing, S3 support, advanced dead-pixel detection and the ability to export results into Premiere Pro and Resolve. QScan Verify then adds proper SDR/HDR playback, scopes, comparative analysis and manual event tagging, so automated QC and the human review process can sit together rather than existing as two disconnected jobs.
There is even QScan One, which packages AQC and Verify together on a single workstation. That is a very practical proposition for smaller post facilities that want serious QC without building a dedicated infrastructure around it.
At the other end of the AI scale you have NVIDIA and AMD. NVIDIA is obviously everywhere in this conversation, from generative video through to media analysis and inference, but AMD is increasingly important too, not just in workstations but across CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and adaptive compute used in media systems.
The bit I think is particularly interesting for our industry is local AI. Media companies have enormous amounts of valuable footage, intellectual property and client material, and there are some fairly obvious advantages to being able to run models locally rather than sending everything into somebody else’s cloud.
My advice when you see the inevitable “AI powered” sign this weekend is simple: ask what it actually saves you from doing. The good demos have a very clear answer.
On Saturday September 12, RedShark and Adobe are taking over De Hallen Studios for Adobe Color After Dark Amsterdam, running from 6pm to 9pm.
The idea is simple. Get out of the RAI, have some food and drinks, meet other editors, filmmakers, colorists and post people, and actually spend some time talking to people without a badge scanner being pushed towards you every thirty seconds.
We have Kylee Peña presenting Adobe’s new Color Mode at 7pm and again at 8pm, plus demos and technology from a pretty serious group of partners including AMD, AJA (7.B25), ASUS (11.B36), Atomos (7.B19), Dell (7.B47), Digital Anarchy, EIZO (7.D33), Flanders Scientific (7.A21), Godox (12.H38), OWC (7.A60) and Suite (1.D07).
The response has genuinely been huge. Registration has gone way beyond what we normally see for these events and we have finite capacity at De Hallen, so if there are still spaces available when you read this, register now. If it has moved to a waitlist, join the waitlist anyway. IBC diaries change constantly and people will inevitably move in and out as meetings, dinners and travel plans shift.
Register or join the waitlist for Adobe Color After Dark
We have also put together a full guide to parties, mixers and networking events across Amsterdam throughout IBC week, so if you are planning your evenings have a look at that too.
Read our IBC2026 Amsterdam parties and networking guide
There are lots of great events happening this week. Obviously I think ours should be near the top of your list, but I may be slightly biased.
Looking across all of this, there are a few interesting themes running through IBC2026.
Cameras are getting smaller, more computational and, frankly, stranger. DJI, Insta360 and GoPro are now making products that professional filmmakers should take seriously, while Sony, Canon, Nikon/RED and the traditional cinema manufacturers keep pushing high-end technology further down the price ladder.
Lighting is another category that has completely changed. LEDs are no longer the convenient compromise, they are increasingly the default choice even on serious productions, and companies like Godox and Aputure are forcing that market to move faster and faster.
Displays are finally giving creatives real choice, storage is becoming as much about access and collaboration as raw capacity, and broadcast infrastructure is gradually moving into software without pretending that decades of existing hardware have suddenly become obsolete.
Then there is AI. There will be a lot of rubbish talked about AI at IBC, just as there was last year, but there will also be some extremely useful technology. The interesting products are the ones that don’t ask you to completely reinvent your workflow, they just make part of it faster, easier or less painful.
That, IMO, is what IBC is still brilliant for. You can read all the announcements, watch the videos and argue about specs online, but eventually you need to touch the product, see the picture, hear the demo and talk to the people who built it.
See you at the RAI, and hopefully at De Hallen on Saturday night.
Wear comfortable shoes. Amen.